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by falcolas 4032 days ago
One more thing to consider: given its logically unambiguous nature, Lojban would make a great language for communicating with a computer...
2 comments

This comes up often, but it turns out to be pretty crappy, in practice, for a few reasons.

First, although it's not ambiguous, it's vague. It's considered good practice to leave empty places that are not immediately relevant to the conversation. The way this works is kinda like if every every sentence is a function call with arguments, and every argument has a default value; according to the language spec, though, the default value for each argument is to be inferred from context.

Second, it's often referentially ambiguous (e.g. "the bear" doesn't necessarily uniquely identify an entity), and its system of anaphora (think pronouns), although different than English's is insufficiently precise for computer communication.

Third, there are other languages which are designed with that goal in mind, and which are more natural. I'm thinking specifically of Attempto Controlled English.

I agree, and wonder about what kinds of communication it would facilitate. Writing computer programs in Lojban?